He's not pessimistic enough, but paradoxically, he's also not optimistic enough. << Even we exceptional Americans must come to grips with the collapse of faith and fertility - especially in the rapidly and dangerously declining Muslim world - in order to prevail in a world in which tragic outcomes are more common than happy endings. >>
The harsh, inevitable, relentless, merciless metaphysical certitude is that 99.999999999999% of not just cultures but individual DNA will die off. Tragic but true.
That seems a gloomy outcome, but it's how we got to be here, reading and writing, using our kilograms of supersonic cognitive horsepower and the other 99.999999999999% of attempts at DNA development did not. There's not enough room for all of us. We the Chosen People made it through the challenges and vicissitudes of life.
The winnowing process is pretty quick. It was only about 30,000 years ago that an African man left Africa and his male descendants replaced all non-African men. It was only about 90,000 years ago that a female African left Africa and her female descendants replaced all non-African females. I guess males turn over quicker than females because they enter the Darwin Awards more frequently through war and general carnage and daring. One male can keep lots of females in babies so they are generally in surplus, subject to genocidal slaughter when one tribe took over another.
That must also be why male DNA is more geographically restricted than female - primate females in general like to hop the fence to mate and they are the prize in genocidal conflict, along with land and resources.
Now it's not just loser cultures that die off. It seems likely that we're nearing the end of wet chemistry cognitive horsepower, to be taken over by electrons, photons, silicon, gallium, germanium and umpty trillion sensors for everything.
Just as chimps were the template for human development, humans are the launchpad for the extra-somatic phase of cognition and sentience. So people had better become accustomed to the idea of becoming irrelevant, just as chimps are irrelevant to the functioning of New York, London, Beijing and the 7 billion humans seething nearly everywhere.
Consciousness seems to be an essential constituent to bring the four forces wave functions into reality. But what law of nature says the cognition has to be done by watery goop based on DNA? DNA seems to be more a means to an end than an end in itself. There has been a billion year trend in DNA development, so it's tendentious if not teleological.
If human population on Earth drops all the way back to 300 million, or even fewer, then so what? That's still a pretty good gene pool and economies of scale. Heck, even 100 million would be a pretty good number.
Mqurice |
